Wordle Answer 18 November 2026 (Solved in 4 Guesses)

The Wordle answer for November 18, 2026 is BLURT. Four rows — and the real decision on this board was not which letters to guess, but which of two surviving words to spend a row on first.

Below is the complete record for the wordle answer 18 nov 2026: every guess, what each tile eliminated, and how the field fell from 2,315 possible words to one. The chain was produced by running the puzzle's own two-pass scoring against the official answer list, so each row is reproducible rather than recalled.

Today's Answer and the Final Board

The answer was BLURT, solved in 4 guesses out of the 6 the puzzle allows.

SLATE  ⬛🟩⬛🟨⬛
FLINT  ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩
CLOUT  ⬛🟩⬛🟨🟩
BLURT  🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩

Puzzle No. 1,978, a Wednesday board. Blurt is to say something before you have decided to — to let a word out ahead of the thought behind it, which is a fair description of a board that spends three rows circling one consonant cluster.

BLURT sits inside the official 2,315-word answer list, so today's field opened at exactly 2,315 candidates.

Read the second column: L is green on all four rows. It was placed by the opener and never moved again. Now read the last column — E grey on row one, then T green on rows two, three and four. By the end of the second row both of those seats were locked, and six letters had been struck out of the answer entirely.

The Full Guessing Chain, Step by Step

Four rows, each one the highest-value row available when it was played.

Guess 1: SLATE — 2,315 down to 9

SLATE came back ⬛🟩⬛🟨⬛.

• L green at position 2. Placed on the first row and never moved again.
• T yellow at position 4. The word holds a T, but not in that seat.
• S, A and E grey. Three letters, no unclaimed copies of any of them.

Three letters taken off the board entirely in one row. The pool fell from 2,315 to 9: nine words left standing out of more than two thousand, and the board has not yet placed a single letter correctly beyond the second seat. This is what a productive opener looks like: not a dramatic row, just three hard zeros and one letter in the right place.

Guess 2: FLINT — 9 down to 2

FLINT returned ⬛🟩⬛⬛🟩.

• L green at position 2. Holding.
• T green at position 5. The T that was yellow one seat to the left in row one now sits green at the end.
• F, I and N grey. Three consonants eliminated in a single row.

Nine words to two. That is the row that actually decided the puzzle, and it did it by converting a yellow into a green — the T moved one seat right and stopped being ambiguous — and then by killing three consonants at once. What survived were words that fit a skeleton: a letter at position 2, a T at position 5, and none of S, A, E, F, I or N anywhere in them.

Two words fit. Both carry the L at position 2 and the T at position 5, and they disagree at the other three seats.

Guess 3: CLOUT — 2 down to 1

CLOUT came back ⬛🟩⬛🟨🟩.

• L green at position 2, T green at position 5. Both holding.
• U yellow at position 4. The word contains a U, one seat to the left of where it was offered.
• C and O grey. Both dead.

Here is the part worth slowing down for. With two candidates left, one of them ranked higher than the other; typing that word would have ended the puzzle a row earlier if it had been the answer. The row went to CLOUT instead. A wrong row still splits a shortlist of two, and CLOUT was carrying two letters that had never been tested on this board — C and O. Both came back grey. The shortlist was down to one, and the answer had nothing left to prove.

The U is the interesting tile. It came back yellow at position 4, which says the letter is present and that seat is wrong. With L holding position 2 and T holding position 5, that left exactly two open seats for it — the first and the third. A row that was supposed to be about C and O had quietly narrowed the vowel to half the board.

Guess 4: BLURT — the last row

One candidate standing, and the board came back all green.

The U sat at position 3, one of the two seats the yellow tile had left open. L held at position 2, T held at position 5, and the two letters that survived every elimination — B and R — filled the remaining seats. Four rows of six, two to spare.

How the Candidate Pool Collapsed

Three things stand out.

First, the opener did almost all of the work. 2,315 down to 9 is more than ninety-nine words in every hundred, removed by three grey tiles and one green. Everything after row one was shortlist management.

Second, the second row was the one that placed letters rather than removed them. T went from yellow to green, F and I and N died, and nine words became two. On a board this narrow, a row that both places a letter and kills three others is close to the theoretical maximum.

Third, the third row did not improve a single position — and it was still the right row to play. It removed two letters from consideration, which is what a shortlist of two actually needs. Position improvements are not the only kind of progress a row can make.

Why a Yellow Tile Is a Seat Problem

This board contains a clean demonstration of a rule that trips up a lot of players, and it takes one letter to see it.

On row one, the T in SLATE sat at position 4 and came back yellow. On row two, the T in FLINT sat at position 5 and came back green. Same letter, two different rows, two different verdicts — and the answer never changed.

The reason is that a yellow tile does not say where the letter is. It says two things only: the letter is in the word, and this particular seat is not it. That is a much smaller claim than it feels like. A yellow at position 4 rules out exactly one of five seats and leaves four open. It took a second row, with the T offered somewhere else, to find the seat that actually held it.

The greys work the other way, and they work by count rather than by membership:

1. Every position that matches the answer is marked green, and that letter is removed from the answer's inventory.
2. Every position still unmarked is marked yellow if the letter has inventory left, otherwise grey.

On today's board no guess repeated a letter, so every grey was an unambiguous zero — the letter is simply not in the answer at all. That is why the filtering was so aggressive: S, A, E, F, I, N, C and O were not "probably absent", they were spent, counted, and struck out. When a guess does repeat a letter, the same two passes can produce one green and one grey in the same row, and that pair means "one copy, and here is the seat it occupies" rather than "absent".

What You Can Take Away

A yellow is a seat ruled out, not a letter ruled out. T was yellow at position 4 and green at position 5 on the next row. If a letter comes back yellow, move it; do not remove it.

Three greys on the opener is the good outcome. SLATE returning three dead letters took the field to nine words. A row that kills letters is doing more work than a row of near-misses.

A shortlist of two still needs a decision. The highest-ranked candidate was withheld on row three, and a probe was played instead to eliminate two untested letters. That is not indecision — it is the cheapest way to make the last row certain.

A row that improves no position can still be the best row available. CLOUT changed nothing about where any known letter sits. It removed C and O, and that was enough.

If you want to play the November 18 board yourself, or work back through the ones you missed, the Wordle game page and the daily answer archive are both free and need no sign-up.